24 August 2003: Across the marble
floor of the Shrine of the Imam Hussein in Kerbala scampers Suheil with
his plastic bag of metal. He points first to a red stain on the
flagstones. "This was a red smoke grenade that the Americans
fired," he tells me. "And that was another grenade mark."
The Shia worshippers are kneeling amid these burn marks, eyes glistening
at the gold fašade of the mosque which marks the very place, behind
silver bars kissed by the faithful, where - in an epic battle far more
decisive in human history than any conflict fought by the United States
- Imam al-Hussein was cut down in AD680. There is a clink as, one by
one, Suheil drops his souvenirs on to the marble.

US forces denied that any ordnance
fell upon the shrine when they opened fire close to the Huseiniya mosque
last month. Of course they denied it. Denial has become a disease in
Iraq - as it has through most of the Middle East. The Americans deny
that they kill innocent civilians in Iraq - but kill them all the same.
The Israelis deny they kill innocent civilians in the occupied
territories - indeed, they even deny the occupation - but kill them all
the same. So folk like Suheil are valuable. They expose lies. The
evidence, in this case, are his little souvenirs. On one of the grenades
in his plastic bag are written the words "Cartridge 44mm Red Smoke
Ground Marker M713 PB-79G041-001". Another is designated as a
"White Star Cluster M 585", yet another carries the code
"40mm M195 KX090 (figure erased) 010-086". They are strange
things to read in a religious building whose scholars normally
concentrate on the minutiae of Koranic sura rather than the globalised
linguistics of the arms trade.

But one of the Kerbala shrine's
guards, Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, was killed by the Americans when they
arrived to assist Iraqi police in a confrontation with armed thieves
near the shrine. Two more Shias were shot dead by the Americans during a
protest demonstration the next day.

Suheil insist that the US troops
wanted to enter the mosque - an unlikely scenario since they are under
orders to stay away from its vicinity - but four bullets did smash into
an outer wall. "We are peaceful people - so why do we need
this?" Suheil asks me plaintively. "Remember how we suffered
under Saddam?" And here he points upwards to another sacrilegious
assault on the shrine, this time amid the gold of one of the two
principal minarets - a shrapnel gash from a shell fired by Saddam's
legions during the great Shia revolt of 1991, the rebellion we
encouraged and then betrayed after the last Gulf War.

So you'd think, wouldn't you, that the
shootings at Kerbala were an established fact. But no. The US still
insists it never fired into the shrine of the Imam Hussein and "has
no information" on the dead. Just as it had "no
information" about the massacre of at least six Iraqi civilians by
its soldiers during a house raid in the Mansour district of Baghdad a
month ago. Just as it has no information on the number of Iraqi civilian
casualties during and after the illegal Anglo-American invasion,
estimated at up to 5,223 by one reputable organisation and up to 2,700
in and around Baghdad alone according to the Los Angeles Times.

And I've no doubt there would have
been "no information" about the man shot dead by US troops
outside Abu Ghraib prison last week had he not inconveniently turned out
to be a prize-winning Reuters cameraman. Thus Mazen Dana's death became
a "terrible tragedy" - this from the same American authorities
whose Secretary of State Colin Powell thought that the tank fire which
killed another Reuters cameraman and a Spanish journalist in April was
"appropriate". Of course, the Americans didn't hesitate to
peddle the old lie about how Dana's camera looked like a
rocket-propelled grenade - the same cock-and-bull story the Israelis
produced back in 1985 when they killed a two-man CBS crew, Tewfiq
Ghazawi and Bahij Metni, in southern Lebanon.

But there's a far more hateful bit of
denial and hypocrisy being played out now in the US over two young and
beautiful women. The first, Private Jessica Lynch, is feted as an
American heroine after being injured during the American invasion of
Iraq and then "rescued" from her Iraqi hospital bed by US
Special Forces. Now it just happens that Private Lynch - far from firing
at her Iraqi attackers until the last bullet, as the Pentagon would have
had us believe - was injured in a road accident between two military
trucks during an ambush and that Iraqi doctors had been giving her
special care when Lynch's "rescuers" burst into her unguarded
hospital. But the second young American is a real heroine, a girl called
Rachel Corrie who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was about
to demolish a Palestinian home and who was killed - wearing a clearly
marked jacket and shouting through a loudspeaker - when the Israeli
driver crushed her beneath his bulldozer and then drove backwards over
her body again. All this was filmed. As a Jewish writer, Naomi Klein,
bravely pointed out in The Guardian, "Unlike Lynch, Corrie did not
go to Gaza to engage in combat; she went to try to thwart it." Yet
not a single American government official has praised Rachel Corrie's
courage or condemned her killing by the Israeli driver. President Bush
has been gutlessly silent. For their part, the Israeli government tried
to smear the activist group to which Rachel Corrie belonged by claiming
that two Britons later involved in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv had
attended a memorial service to her - as if the organisers could have
known of the wicked deed the two men had not yet committed.

But there's nothing new in smearing
the dead, is there? Back in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, I
remember well how the British Army's press office at Lisburn in Co
Antrim would respond to the mysterious death of British ex-soldiers or
Englishmen who were inconveniently killed by British soldiers. The dead
were always described as - and here, reader, draw in your breath -
"Walter Mitty characters". I used to get sick of reading this
smear in Belfast Telegraph headlines. Anonymous army officers would pass
it along to the press. The guy was a Walter Mitty, a fantasist whose
claims could not be believed. This was said of at least three dead men
in Northern Ireland.

And I have a suspicion, of course,
that this is where Tony Blair's adviser Tom Kelly first heard of Walter
Mitty and the ease with which authority could libel the dead. Born and
bred in Northern Ireland, he must have read the same lies in the Belfast
papers as I did, uttered by the same anonymous army "press
spokesmen" with as little knowledge of Thurber as Mr Kelly himself
when they spoke to journalists over the phone. So from that dark war in
Northern Ireland, I think, came the outrageous smear against Dr David
Kelly, uttered by his namesake to a correspondent on The Independent.